Nativist Video Depicts Apparent Shooting

The Intelligence Report has obtained a chilling video that Robert Crooks, the leader of the nativist extremist group Mountain Minutemen, E-mailed this summer to several other prominent nativist leaders, including Jim Gilchrist, co-founder of the original Minuteman Project. In the E-mail, Crooks suggests that Gilchrist is a weakling who can "Talk the Talk" but not "Walk the Walk."

"This video shows how to keep a 'Home Depot' parking lot empty," Crooks wrote in his sneering July 26 E-mail, titled "Homeland Defence." Gilchrist, whose organization had earlier provided Crooks' group with supplies, responded by banning members of his organization from any contact with Crooks.

Filmed through a night-vision scope, the grainy four-minute video shows two or three men standing on a hill that appears to be on the Mexican side of the border, beyond a barbed-wire fence. "All right, come on across, motherfuckers," a man says off camera in a whisper. "Yeah, go that way. I dare you to go that way. That's my fucking trail, bitch!"

Then, after muttering about the distant figures being "cockroaches," the man shouts out loud, "Hey putos ["faggots"], one, two, three! Get the fuck out of here!" Next comes the distinct sound of a shotgun shell being chambered, followed by a sudden flash of light and the sound of a shotgun blast.

The direction of the gunfire is unclear.

In an E-mail responding to a request for comment from the Report, Crooks said only that he did not film the video, did not post it on a video-sharing site, and is not the narrator. He did not confirm or deny forwarding it to Gilchrist.

Crooks' group, the Mountain Minutemen, is one of several armed Minuteman spinoffs now active on the U.S.-Mexico border in the rugged desert between Campo and Jacumba, Calif. Crooks has a reputation as a particularly hard-line nativist. His group is believed to be tiny.

In the video, when the camera pans back to the hilltop, the men are gone. "And that's how you get rid of Mexicans," the narrator says with a mocking laugh, before concluding with an apology for the shaky camera work. "Sorry, folks, it's kind of hard to shoot a shotgun and a video at the same time."